Julia Blackburn: 8 books

In 1792, when he was forty-seven, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya contracted a serious illness that left him stone deaf. In this extraordinary book, Julia Blackburn follows Goya through the remaining thirty-five years of his life. It was a time of political turmoil, of war, violence, and confusion,...

Julia Blackburn has always collected things that hold stories about the past, especially the very distant past: mammoth bones, little shells that happen to be two million years old, a flint shaped as a weapon long ago. Shortly after her husband’s death, Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland,...

This is the story of three people: acclaimed writer Julia Blackburn; her father, Thomas—a poet and alcoholic with an addiction to barbiturates; and her mother, Rosalie—a flirtatious painter with no boundaries. After Julia's parents divorced, her mother took in male lodgers with the hope...

From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it. Billie Holiday’s life is inseparable from an account of her troubles,...

In this fascinatingly imaginative novel, Julia Blackburn has decimated all the rules, creating a magical tale that is part fable, part allegory, part present, part past, and wholly genuine and poetic. The unnamed protagonist has recently lost someone she loved, and her solution is to abandon...

In 1814 Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on St. Helena for a surreal exile that would last until his death six years later. “A resonant meditation on exile, fame, the stories we tell about ourselves (and) the bigger stories we tell about our great figures.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

In the late 19th century, an English missionary arrives on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, intent on wiping out fornication among the natives. Instead he incurs a curse that strikes first his dark-skinned wife, then his son and grandson. But is the curse supernatural—or a white man's guilty...

In 1913, at the age of 54, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. Brilliantly reviewed, astonishingly original, this "eloquent and illuminating portrait of an extraordinary woman" (New York Times Book Review) tells a fascinating, true story in the tradition of Isak Dinesen and Barry Lopez.